Future recruiting hopeful Winston Shepard (center, with Falcons hat on) watches the game during the Aztecs mens basketball game against TCU at Viejas Arena in San Diego Saturday night.

Tony Bland was hired by San Diego State as an assistant coach last summer. He was new to recruiting, new to the high school scene, and someone suggested he start by seeing an AAU team called Dream Vision that had Shabazz Muhammad, the nation’s top prep prospect.

So he did.

Bland saw this 6-foot-8 guy who could play all five positions, who could handle it, who could cover a point guard or power forward, who had a high basketball IQ and uncanny floor vision, who was capable of getting a quadruple-double: points, rebounds, assists, blocks.

Said Bland: “I thought, ‘Oh, he has to be the No. 1 player in the country.’ ”

He was watching Winston Shepard.

He has grown an inch to 6-9 since last summer, and he is now an Aztec. Shepard made official Wednesday morning what he orally committed in February, signing a national letter of intent with SDSU on the first day of the spring signing period and putting an exclamation point on arguably the school’s best-ever incoming class.

Shepard isn’t the nation’s No. 1 player — Muhammad, who signed with UCLA a few hours later, still is — but he isn’t far from it.
Rivals.com elevated him from four to five stars in its final rankings for the class of 2012, and from the No. 40 overall player to No. 21. That makes Shepard, on paper at least, the highest-rated prep prospect to choose SDSU in school history (Rivals had Kawhi Leonard at No. 48).

Forgive Fisher and his coaching staff for their trepidation, not because they didn’t trust Shepard (they did) but because a year ago they lost two recruits they thought they had. Cheikh Mbodj, a 6-10 junior college center, switched allegiances to Cincinnati at the last moment during the spring signing period, and Loyola Marymount transfer Kevin Young jumped to Kansas in June despite signing a scholarship agreement with SDSU eight months earlier.

“I liked Winston the first time I saw him,” Fisher said, “and I’m a hard guy to please. He was somebody I didn’t have to have an acquired taste for.”

If there was a knock on Shepard, it’s that he is not a pure shooter and that while he may be able to play multiple positions he doesn’t have a definitive one. He also played in Muhammad’s considerable shadow on the AAU circuit with Dream Vision, and alongside high-major prospects Anthony Bennett and Brandon Ashley at Las Vegas Findlay Prep, which earlier this month won the unofficial national prep title on a pair of clinching free throws by Shepard.

But they said the same things about Jalen Rose 20 years earlier, and Fisher transformed him into the Fab Five’s 6-8 point guard at Michigan and a 13-year NBA veteran.

“We joke around and call him Jalen Rose 2.0, but I can see that,” said Bland, SDSU’s lead recruiter who replaced Justin Hutson last summer. “I can also see him being a mismatch at the 4, where he takes his man outside and drives on him. To me, that’s his greatest strength, his versatility.